Just think about all that money that was spent by both parties on this election - how much good it could have done for the poor, the downtrodden, the homeless. How many small, but liveable homes it could have provided, how many meals to feed the hungry.

The good news is that they weren't just burning the money and making campaign smoke signals with it.

They spent money on advertising, promotional materials, and a lot of other stuff. In short, they paid people for things, and those people will pay other people for different things. And when this passed money comes around to you, you should feel free to spend it on homes for the homeless and food for the hungry.

I will admit when I'm wrong, I didn't take in the bigger picture. Good point.

Just think about all that money that was spent by both parties on this election - how much good it could have done for the poor, the downtrodden, the homeless. How many small, but liveable homes it could have provided, how many meals to feed the hungry.

The good news is that they weren't just burning the money and making campaign smoke signals with it.

They spent money on advertising, promotional materials, and a lot of other stuff. In short, they paid people for things, and those people will pay other people for different things. And when this passed money comes around to you, you should feel free to spend it on homes for the homeless and food for the hungry.

Comm, only a fool believes that money actually makes it back down the pipeline to the poor, you know it and I know it. (okay, maybe a token amount of money does make it to them).

A better solution would be to stop the fundraising, give all candidates an equal amount of air time, and let them raise votes without any 'political donations' - that would be just fine by me.

The Republicans are all about looting the government and destroying the fabric of democracy. They need to pull themselves out of this destructive nosedive.

Bull. The next 4 years is going to be the Obama administration looting and destroying the fabric of society (not that Romney wouldn't have done the same, but at least he would have been somewhat restrained by wanting to get reelected and wouldn't use the power of the pardon to let all his criminal friends off the hook like Obama will be able to do). The country is going to go the dogs. More specifically, it's going to make all the kinds of mistakes that socialist countries in Europe and elsewhere did that are now all bankrupt. The US is going to follow suit, and the economy is going to be terrible. Of this I feel absolutely certain. But I also think that most Americans will pretend to enjoy it. Reality still hasn't set in yet. It's like a junkie who's so deluded he can't comprehend how bad off he is until he runs out of smack and runs into a brick wall. Then he hits rock bottom. Then he either dies, or gets sobered up by harsh reality. This is where the US is going to be in the next 4 years.

Mark my words, Obama lied about literally everything the first time around. This time will be no different - except it will be even worse.

The Republicans are all about looting the government and destroying the fabric of democracy. They need to pull themselves out of this destructive nosedive.

Bull. The next 4 years is going to be the Obama administration looting and destroying the fabric of society (not that Romney wouldn't have done the same, but at least he would have been somewhat restrained by wanting to get reelected and wouldn't use the power of the pardon to let all his criminal friends off the hook like Obama will be able to do). The country is going to go the dogs. More specifically, it's going to make all the kinds of mistakes that socialist countries in Europe and elsewhere did that are now all bankrupt. The US is going to follow suit, and the economy is going to be terrible. Of this I feel absolutely certain. But I also think that most Americans will pretend to enjoy it. Reality still hasn't set in yet. It's like a junkie who's so deluded he can't comprehend how bad off he is until he runs out of smack and runs into a brick wall. Then he hits rock bottom. Then he either dies, or gets sobered up by harsh reality. This is where the US is going to be in the next 4 years.

Mark my words, Obama lied about literally everything the first time around. This time will be no different - except it will be even worse.

Massachusetts was dead last in job creation. It had above-average unemployment. It was illegally running a large deficit. The state's 'rainy day' fund was drying out. The population wanted someone to fix the state. They elected Romney.

Romney looked at the current budget (not his, the one passed before he got there).

He said 'This isn't balanced. We have to cut some things.

He asked the legislature for special power to make cuts, and balanced the budget.

People affected by the cuts didn't like Romney.

They wanted him to fix their problems, but they didn't want any pain.

For 4 more years, Romney balanced every budget.

He had to veto 250 expenditures his last year to do so.

His vetoes were overturned, so he used that special power to cut that spending anyway.

4 years of balanced budgets. 4 years of people getting mad at him for cutting 'their' programs.

He also increased revenues, increased fees. He closed down loopholes that banks were using to transfer value to other states. Conservatives didn't like him raising fees. The banks didn't like him forcing them to pay taxes.

In the end, Massachusetts was 28th in job creation... where 4 years before it had been 50th.

Unemployment was in the mid 4%s, where it had been around 6%. T

he state was #1 in education, where it had been #6.

But people were mad. Conservatives were upset about revenue increases. Progressives were mad about cuts.

Now, Massachusetts overwhelmingly voted for Obama.

Even people who experienced Romney's ability to turn things around, overwhelmingly decided they like a guy who promises them free stuff with no pain more.

Americans want a politician who can promise to fix everything, without any pain. Since that can't happen, they will never get things fixed.

Elizabeth Warren prevails over the bankster's golden boy in Massachusetts. This is good.

What's so great about Elizabeth Warren? Her economic theories are an embarrassment, and have been handily debunked. She was busy telling people "you didn't build that" well before Obama made it fashionable.

Warren is one of a very small circle of experts who, during the boom years, accurately diagnosed the frailty of American finance capitalism. In scholarly articles, blog posts and several widely praised books, she has focused on the ways post-1970s wage stagnation has squeezed the middle class, leading to a drop in savings, a massive spike in consumer debt and more hours of labor spent to purchase core middle-class goods like healthcare and housing. The cumulative effect of these changes, as she argued in her talk at Berkeley, is families taking on far more risk than those of a generation earlier, and an economy skating on very thin ice.

. . .

[Warren's] COP has managed to raise a considerable ruckus. Meeting at least once a week, the panel (which includes Warren, Hensarling, former Republican Senator John Sununu, AFL-CIO associate counsel Damon Silvers and Richard Neiman, superintendent of banks for the New York State banking department) has churned out four rigorous, detailed reports.

The first asked a series of pointed questions about Treasury's strategy and the rationale for its approach. Paulson replied, but "he answered our questions by cutting and pasting from earlier speeches," Warren says. "I think he just assumed he'd mumble around, we'd mumble around and that would be the end of oversight." Instead, in the second report the COP "put together a grid that listed every question we asked, quoted his answer and called him out every time he didn't answer our specific question."

The panel's latest report created the most headlines. (It was also the first unanimous one, in which Hensarling did not dissent. His office did not return a request for an interview.) Using publicly accessible information, the COP attempted to ascertain the market value of the assets Treasury has purchased. Describing the letter Paulson originally sent to the COP, Warren said, "These 'investments,' as he called them, 'were at or near par.' That's a direct quote. That means for every $100 invested, the taxpayers get $100 back in stock and warrants. It was perfectly clear that this was not true, and it was not true not because the market fell afterwards. It was not true on the date of the transaction."

Indeed, the report found that Treasury has already overpaid by a staggering $78 billion, or almost a third of the money it had spent at the time of the report. "They described a transaction to do one thing," Warren says, "and it was designed from its inception to do something very different." She doesn't say what that "something" is, but it's clear: subsidize the banks' losses.

Americans want a politician who can promise to fix everything, without any pain. Since that can't happen, they will never get things fixed.

By the way, I am not a republican. Just sayin'

...and yet he vowed to do away with the same health plan he instituted. I don't think he would be that astute as President. Every Republican since Reagan has left us with a bigger debt than what they came in...even if they had Republican congresses.

Romney's numbers didn't make sense such as defense spending. It smacks of paying off the miitary-industrial complex.

He was a hawk and seemed to want to drag us into a war with Iran and militarily get involved in the Arab spring conflicts. Would he get out of Afghanistan by 2014? How would he pay for that?

He wanted to label China a currency manipulator. Which may be true, but China has the power to take economc punitive action in some way.

Managing a small state is one thing. Tons of things you don't have to finance or deal with such as defense, foregn policy, etc. Plenty of governors who did a good or even great job on the state level got into the white house and rang up debts.

He was basicallly preaching trickle down economics without calling it that and that hasn't worked.

We won't even mention the social issues that his Presidency would aggravate.

Although a small number of ballots remain to be counted, as of this writing, votes for a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives outweigh votes for Republican candidates. Based on ThinkProgress’ review of all ballots counted so far, 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic candidate for the House and only 53,402,643 were cast for a Republican — meaning that Democratic votes exceed Republican votes by more than half a million.

Two caveats are necessary in considering these numbers. The first is that all ballots have not been counted, so these numbers will change somewhat as more returns trickle in. (Because the remaining ballots are more likely to be from Democratic-leaning west coast states, it is likely that the Democrats’ margin will increase somewhat over time.) The second caveat is that these numbers include several California districts where two members of the same party ran against each other, and they do not include districts where a single candidate ran unopposed. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the nation is very closely divided over which party should control the House, with Democrats appearing to enjoy a slight edge.

The actual partisan breakdown of the 113th Congress will be very different, however. Currently, Republicans enjoy a 233-192 advantage over Democrats, with 10 seats remaining undecided. That means that, in a year when Republicans earned less than half the popular vote, they will control a little under 54 percent of the House even if Democrats run the table on the undecided seats.

...

Nothing about this election, at a federal level, screams mandate for the Republican Party.

Demographically speaking, it would be wildly stupid to go libertarian. Regardless of what they might think of themselves, Americans are not a libertarian people, and in their heart of hearts, they want big government. They merely don't want to pay for it. That's not libertarianism, it's cheapness.

The Republicans definitely need to change something. If I were making their game plan (irrespective of my own beliefs) I'd go with:
Pro-immigration (framed as open borders)
Anti-abortion
Anti-gay marriage
Tax reform (probably flat tax for simplicity)
Community Outreach - Republicans believe charity > govt safety nets, so the party needs to put its money where its mouth is and visibly. That would preclude 501(c)3 status, but it'd be worthwhile.
And above all: groom a Hispanic man for a 2016 run

Right, it would be pretty easy for them to court hispanics while minimally compromising their current positions.

comm wrote:

On the other hand...
I WANT them to take a more Libertarian approach, which has been successful for them in the past... before the religious nuts took over.

Well it would be more tasteful and charming than what they're doing now, but you don't win elections by kicking out a sizable part of your base, and however many pseudo-libertarian college students you think such a change might win over, it's not going to make up the deficit, so it's not going to happen.

The way I see it, the Republican way is totally corrupt, and has eaten its own. This happened in two ways.

In the first, the Republican elites sold a script to its base that scared it, inspired it, and commanded it to march against Obama. But the script: fear the illegals, fear the food stamp dependents, fear the liberals, fear the feminists, struck just enough enemies to keep its base small, and repel the genuinely neutral.

In the second, the Republican political consultants devoured the Republican elites. Rove and company plied the rich donors with sugared, honeyed words and lies. In return they bilked them out of massive amounts of cash. The war party was already fat and loaded, like Xerxes's army, before it could even begin to descend on the lean, mean Democratic machine. Whether the consultants were dimly aware of the peril or true believers or what doesn't matter, they still got rich off the mega-donor stooges like Sheldon Adelson and a hundred other hundred-thousand dollar donors.

The Tea Party, by the way, still remains. So don't expect any sudden repentance or realization. Titus is still way, way ahead of the pack on the whole 'demographics is destiny' theme. Somewhere along the way, when the Tea Party began its belated revolt against the Bush Dynasty, they also ditched their meritorious and sincere pursuit of hispanic voters. (Yes, Dubya and his brother are actually extremely savvy with the hispanic community.) We will get to 2014 and House primary challenges before the Republicans can really, truly clean house. I may get in on the action in terms of removing McConnell from his position, but I won't be fighting from the Republican side.

Meanwhile, there are sensible conservatives, or right-wingers, or just non-lefties preaching a doctrine of salvation. Enter Timothy Carney:

Quote:

The new Republican populism should declare war on the cronies and special interests who use big government to rig the game in their favor and deny opportunity to those trying to climb the ladder and live the American dream.

It's time for free-market populism and a Republican Party that fights against all forms of political privilege -- a party that champions all who want to work and take risks in order to improve their lives and raise a family.

Timothy Carney doesn't invoke the middle-class here, but essentially that is what the Republicans need to begin to fight for. And they need to show it, by backing actual fair relief efforts to pull the middle-class out of the economic rut, as well as attacking the bloat and waste of Empire and Industrial Capture. A little f*cking sincerity and principle is in order.

Quote:

Regulations disproportionately harm small businesses and thus benefit the big guys who can afford to hire Byron or Kimberly Dorgan. Bailouts of existing giants keep entrepreneurs from entering a field.

Every small businessman, ambitious immigrant, and would-be-entrepreneur should be a Republican. So should every working man who sees his tax dollars going to Warren Buffett, General Electric and Pfizer.

Democrats run the game these days, and that game is rigged. Republicans need to woo those are losing the game.

Exactly. Republicans need to stop kissing Jamie Dimon's ass, and start shaking down the robber-barons like the criminal scum they are. Just b*tching about Fannie and Freddie's perverse incentives while holding Wall Street blameless won't do it anymore.

German, Italian, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Black, Mexican, Mormon, Catholic, Protestant, American, Immigrant... those are tribes. And we gravitate toward ones of own tribe to START with, then listen to the character of each individual.

Tribalism exists even in the haughtiest blue-bloods. Why was it such a big deal when the first Catholic was elected President? Because he was a member of a new tribe to serve as President. Why was it such a big deal when the first Black was on the Supreme Court? Because he was member of a new tribe to serve on the court.

So many Americans are so mixed nowadays that I can't imagine 'tribes' mattering that much. Like 95% of blacks vote for Obama. I could see 3/4 or so but 95%? lol. Even when blacks vote blindly en masse like that I don't think they'd all consider themselves a 'tribe'.

Obama won by only a few percent... just think if the educational system and media was more to the center instead of leaning left.